Richard Silva, Fresno Artist

The first painting I noticed in Richard Silva’s studio on Van Ness I asked about the title.

               “Uh … the Head of a Man? Portrait of a Man?”

               He seemed unconvinced himself. “Generally I just don’t have titles,” he reasoned. “I don’t have titles; I have stories.”

               So what’s the story behind it, I asked.

               “This one has none,” he said.

               Not wanting to let a good conversation slip away I turned to a different painting. What about this one, I asked him. What’s the story behind this:

               “That started out as a still life with fish. And I put a cat in there. There is a face of a cat up here,” he said, pointing to a corner in the painting. “And then the cat became … well I don’t know if it’s still a cat. If this story reveals anything at all about Silva’s artistic process, then so be it. But this isn’t the point.

               “I got a lot of cats at home. I rescue cats. Somebody dumps them out, you know, then they come to my house and I feed them and my wife gets upset. She says, ‘You’ve got like a motel in here with all these cats.’ Well what am I gonna do? They’re all here starving to death, you know? So I give them something to eat. And next thing you know they stay and say ‘I like that old man … he took me in’.

               The choice of subject is always personal. Painters choose their subjects because they can freely evocate through them. Some kind of connection is present. When Silva said he takes care of strays because “people just throw them away,” I know this is less about identification and more about salvation. It is the other layer in the story about cats.

               Silva believes we practically throw away everything in our society. But he goes against the tide. “I salvage everything,” he said.

               The contemporary portrait artist Chuck Close suffers from prospopagnosia. He is unable to recognize faces. By painting portraits, he is able to remember faces. Fact is, art is about salvaging—an image, an expression, a memory—that may be lost if not for the artist who in a moment of inspiration deems it worthy of his keeping.